Comments for Immortal

Comment on Jacob Barnett and Scientific Progress by joaquin

joaquin — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 19:46:20 +0000

Miles Mathis is not someone I would recommend to Jake except as a classic example of a crank. Mathis has continually plastered the internet with his “papers” criticizing the work of genuine scientists who, unlike himself, have actually put in the hard work to become credentialed, submitted their work for peer review and have made predictions which have been verified. Mathis has a degree in philosophy. Rather, he is a dilettante who seems to think he ought to be regarded as a genius in science, mathematics, physics, music, singing, writing fiction, book reviewing, art, art criticism and criticism of other critics.
Mathis likes to criticize others but when his own mistakes are pointed out he only replies with insults. As an artist, art critic and singer he doesn’t do any better in those endeavors than he does in math and physics. He is a gross underachiever as an artist yet writes long winded, bitter attacks on more accomplished artists who, unlike himself, are able to infuse their paintings with a sense of life.
It has been more than a decade since Mathis began his folk physics writings and if anything useful had been found in them there would have been a great buzz but there hasn’t been any such thing. His errors have been revealed in dozens of websites by numerous posters many of whom are real scientists and Mathis’ efforts to defend himself by using aliases, to create the illusion of support by others, have failed. People laugh at his coming on to sites with the same writing style and pretending to be average folks enthused by the theories of Miles Mathis. Pathetic.
Mathis is caught in a trap of his own making. He won’t submit to peer review but his theories are demolished by real scientists on the internet for all to see anyway.

Comment on Why Militant Atheism is Necessary by drllau

drllau — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:45:01 +0000

> Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear This I just have to google Eph 6:5 The original greek οἵ δοῦλοι means servant ... so a less emotionally laden translation is servants be faithful to your master as Jesus to God ... presumeably this is the imperative behind servanthood leadership With my IT/IP law background, I recognise this as the duty of fidelity that defines say the relationship of a worker to employer (with counter obligations back). the actual impact that Jesus message had is the exact opposite of your supposition. Christians in the Roman empire were condemned because slaves and freemen comingled as moral equals So if your argument boils down to a modern variant of "taxes is theft, therefore I don't recognise the Federal govt" then I think you need stronger chain of reasoning. Creating a strawman argument is not a true argument. As for Wilberforce, how do you think an individual constructs a moral compass? Let's look at a counterfactual - Marxist-Leninism is atheistic ... how did Stalin or Pol-Pot come to their ethics? > falls in to line with exactly what mankind was doing at the time, perpetuating the damage which was being done during those days rather than rectifying them OK ... now we're getting to some meat. So your argument is because the bible says "love your neighbour as yourself" and imperfect humans fail, then such a God is faithless (and therefore unworthy)? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Comment on Why Militant Atheism is Necessary by Aegist

Aegist — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:00:02 +0000

I wasn’t saying that Christianity caused slavery at all – just that a book which claims to be a source of morality and yet makes statements like “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear.” must be recognized for what it is: A fallible work of fiction by humans trapped in their time…

The fact that Wilberforce was able to realise that the Bibles clear stance on slavery was wrong, and that he should reinterpret other unrelated passages as a new way of looking at slavery does nothing to save the Bible from itself – it simply shows that Wilberforce has a better moral compass than the Bible.

My point is that Slavery is a human made institution which humans than attempted to validate – and the bible is a fine example of this attempt. By claiming God says it is OK (and by providing passages which tell slaves to behave), they could maintain the status quo for much longer. If the Bible had have said “No human shall ever be owned or controlled” – well that would be a completely different story, and at least respectable. but it doesn’t. It just falls in to line with exactly what mankind was doing at the time, perpetuating the damage which was being done during those days rather than rectifying them – which is what I would expect a genuine god-being to do.

Comment on Why Militant Atheism is Necessary by drllau

drllau — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 18:54:07 +0000

> basis for objective knowledge – I’m not sure I follow My fault for being imprecise. It comes from the philosophical question of "how do we know what we know is true?" (epistemology) which originated from apologetics. Nietzsche

states that the Christian moral doctrine provides people with intrinsic value, belief in God ... and a basis for OBJECTIVE knowledge. In this sense, in constructing a world where objective knowledge is possible, Christianity is an antidote against a primal form of nihilism

. Please do not confuse objective knowledge with moral absolutism. In fact, slavery is a bad example as Wilberforce was convicted that all men were equal in the eyes of God and the Quakers antislavery committees laid the groundwork for abolition. Blaming Christianity for slavery (which was widespread in multiple societies) is akin to blaming oxygen for arson.

Comment on Why Militant Atheism is Necessary by Aegist

Aegist — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:04:53 +0000

yeah, the branding experts certainly don’t want it referred to as that – but that is what it has been labelled by the antagonists. ie: Whenever an atheist dared to question a religious claim, the religious would get upset about the ‘militant’ atheist.

As for christian moral doctrine being the basis for objective knowledge – I’m not sure I follow at all. Christianity actually imparts laws much more so than morals. and when it does impart ‘morals’ – it mixes them up with a large collections of clearly immoral morals: genocide, biggotry, hatred, anger, jealousy, possesiveness… all sorts of negative harmful things. The idea that religion has ‘objective’ access to ‘right and wrong’ is one of the biggest moral problems in our world, and is a huge part of problems like ending slavery (historically – since the bible quite clearly allowed it), and ending biggotry again homosexuals and domination of women – since again, the bible quite clearly allows (or demands) both.

Comment on Why Militant Atheism is Necessary by drllau

drllau — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:26:00 +0000

Militant atheism … I certainly hope the branding experts relook at the word choice because it frames the debate as inherently antagonist. But if faith without reason is blind, then reason without faith could be said to be empty (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fides_et_Ratio). Whether you believe Jesus to be mad, bad or sad (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis's_trilemma) Christian moral doctrine was the historical basis for objective knowledge.

Comment on WTF is Going On with Computers? by drllau

drllau — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:34:09 +0000

Simple answer … multicore suits throughput, not latency. There’s a reason data parallelism is easy compared with algorithmic parallelism. Moore’s Curve only reflect the cost/density of transistors on a chip, for a long time Intel focused on raw clock speed (which gave near linear performance improvement) until they found out that what you end up with is a really compact heater element. Other computer manufacturers (eg SGI which focused on balanced memory hierarchies) got swamped under the marketing hype.

Comment on Mapping the Discourse of the Internet by drllau

drllau — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 18:35:19 +0000

This is intriguing as a foundation technology which has long-tail characteristics. I can see your point about reaching the “market” as the adoption rate depends on self-reinforcing traits of having an article/author willing to accept rebuttals, downloading the tool, and also having a counter argument. You have to decide whether you wish to be a platform play v pitch-play. As such I’d point you to

http://www.crashdev.com/2012/01/product-vs-platform-competing-at-right.html

Comment on rbutr Beta Testing Starts Soon by Aegist

Aegist — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 04:59:11 +0000

OK, your password has been reset – try hitting it again, and check your spam folder. Apparently a few people are getting these emails placed in spam very annoying. If you don’t get the emails that way, let me know.

Comment on rbutr Beta Testing Starts Soon by Brooke

Brooke — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 22:36:32 +0000

Hi Shane,

I have signed up for beta, but when I input my username and password it says they are invalid. I tried resetting the password but didn’t work.

Not sure whats going on. Please let me know if there is something I have done wrong.